Midnight Movies?

Midnight Movies?

But for real, who’s responsible for programming NYC’s prominent Midnight Movie line-ups at the Landmark Sunshine and the IFC Center’s sacreligiously-titled Waverly Midnights?

I know as a sociological phenomenon the whole Midnight Movies affair has tapered off to a thin echo of it’s 70’s heyday, but if we’re going to do a thing, let’s at least get it half-right…

From the Sunrise line-up:

–The Godfather–Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory–Real Genius (the disposable Eighties piece of shit with Val Kilmer)–The Nightmare Before Christmas (the disposable Nineties piece of shit with some puppets)–Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan–Teen Witch

There are more than a handful of defensibly outre picks, to be sure, includingly the scortchingly unpleasant grinder Cannibal Holocaust, modern-day Alexandro Jodorowsky Matthew Barney’s celebration of decadent pretense, Cremaster 3, and archetypal Midnighter Performance, but splitting the bill with a bunch of goofy shit pitched to moronic Twentysomethings playing up faux-nostalgia for the half-remembered Eighties seems an awfully grim compromise–the Midnight Movie is supposed to be for drug-addled freakouts tripping on the outer limits of cinema curiousities, not “OMG look at their leg-warmers LOL!” gigglefest field trips and screenings of the AFI canon. It’s most unusual, as Sunrise’s screenings are billed as presentations of the Village Voice, whose Senior Critic literally wrote the fucking book on Midnight Movies… Damn, where’s Antonio Das Mortes, J.?

The less said of IFC Center’s program the better: Party Monster? Cinemania? Eighties nadir-of-genre slasher Maniac? Dark Days? Again; Cinemania? Fuck you guys and your fucking slick “looks like somewhere visited on an episode of Blind Date” bar and your Miranda July. You dudes make going to the movies feel about as adventurous as eating at Chipotle.